Writer and commentator, Richard Rodriguez has a nice essay in the WAPO on the illegal immigrant as the ‘great prophetic figure’ within the Americas. As people have moved in search of livelihood or pleasure, legally or illegally, the inevitable Mexicanization of America and the Americanization of Mexico does create anxieties everywhere. Bush gets this perhaps more than any other politician but he too has to commit that folly of trying to ‘brick up the sky’ as Rodriguez says so eloquently.
Even as we buy this inevitability, what is the price we pay? Rodriguez suggests that Mexico as a ‘vision and economic reality’ distinct from America is dying.
A nation that cannot feed its young with dreams but cuts its milk with memory and sand is going to starve the future; it is going to die. The only place where people will continue to hold on to Mexico will be in the United States.
Was he speaking of India too?
Also read Borderline by Mois s Na M (okay, that’s how the name is represented in print) on absent, porous borders and hollowness of national sovereignty.
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